Canonical Redundancy (Rd) Coefficients: They Should (Almost Never) Be Computed and Interpreted.

Roberts, J. Kyle

According to some researchers canonical correlation results should be interpreted in part by consulting redundancy coefficients (Rd). This paper, however, makes the case that Rd coefficients generally should not be interpreted. Rd coefficients are not multivariate. Furthermore, it makes little sense to interpret coefficients not optimized as part of an analysis. A small heuristic data set using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences is used to illustrate Rd. If the researcher's primary interest is to explore relationships between synthetic variable sets, then canonical correlation analysis should be used, and the interpretation should focus on the multivariate variance-accounted-for effect size, the standardized function coefficients, and the structure coefficients. (Contains 3 tables and 32 references.) (Author/SLD)